If you weren’t aware, we here at T&S use MailChimp for our email newsletter, and the email newsletters of our clients. Typically, we recommend that people focus on two email statistics: Opens and Clicks for individual campaigns.

However, you can draw some interesting conclusions if you look at the email clients your subscribers are using. Fortunately, MailChimp makes that data super easy to access!

Let’s take a look at some data for the email newsletters T&S runs, some conclusions we’ve drawn based on that info, and finally take a look at how you can grab that data for your own list in MailChimp.

Email client data

Here are the four types of organizations we’re looking at.

Business Type

Percentage

Business to Business primarily

35.7%

Business to Consumer primarily

21.4%

Companies that do both

21.4%

Nonprofits

21.4%

Note that Companies that do B2B & B2C were only counted in that category. They were NOT also included in the B2B and B2C category.

Our data runs through October 2015.

Desktop vs. Mobile Overview

Type

Max

Min

Average

Desktop

60.3%

30.1%

43.7%

Mobile

69.9%

39.7%

56.3%

Email Client Overview

Client

Type

Max

Min

Average

iPhone

Mobile

60.1%

34.1%

45.5%

Gmail

Desktop

23.1%

4.4%

10.9%

Outlook 2010

Desktop

15.5%

2.1%

6.8%

Outlook 2013

Desktop

17.4%

0.0%

8.2%

Apple Mail

Desktop

15.9%

0.0%

4.8%

Yahoo

Desktop

8.4%

0.0%

2.7%

Outlook 2007

Desktop

7.7%

0.0%

2.5%

Chrome Mobile

Mobile

7.0%

1.4%

3.4%

Hotmail

Desktop

4.7%

0.0%

1.8%

Android Browser

Mobile

8.5%

0.0%

2.5%

Safari Mobile

Mobile

8.5%

0.0%

2.6%

Android

Mobile

5.9%

0.0%

1.5%

Blackberry

Mobile

0.1%

0.0%

0.0%

If you’re the type of person that likes playing with spreadsheets, you can download the more detailed data.

Conclusions

There are several interesting conclusions we can draw from the detailed data.

iPhone reigns supreme. On every list we looked at, iPhone was the number one client. If you don’t have an iPhone to test your email newsletter on, see if you can find a friend who does, just to be safe. You don’t need to test every newsletter, but test it when you first set everything up, then again on the occasions you run into a problem.

Gmail is a distant second. On 42% of the lists, it was second place. Consider signing up for a free Gmail account to test your email newsletter.

B2B subscribers aren’t on Yahoo or Hotmail. This shouldn’t surprise too many of you. Out of the businesses that were primarily B2B, none of them had Yahoo or Hotmail users. The businesses that were both B2B & B2C averaged 3% on Yahoo and 2% on Hotmail.

Outlook is still more popular than Gmail. While Gmail was more popular than any individual version of Outlook, Outlook overall accounted for 15.7% of the email clients, on average. When looking at just Outlook usage, B2C lists fell below 6% usage, while B2B fell above 13%.

Blackberry is not quite gone. While I’m not sure what you can do with this information, it was interesting that one list had 0.1% attributed to Blackberry.

Checking your list

Of course, ideally you would check these statistics for your own email list once a year or so. Fortunately, if you’re using MailChimp, it’s pretty easy to find out.

After logging into MailChimp, click on Lists in the main menu.

Next to the list you want to check, click the Stats button on the far right.

Scroll down, and the section called Top email clients will give you the breakdown.

If you’re an online marketing nerd like we are, hopefully the conclusions we drew are somewhat interesting. We use data like this to drive decisions we make on our clients’ email newsletters. In an ideal situation, you would do the same for your own list.